Never Mind Woman CEO of the Year! How about Mom of the Year!

Ok, here I go again, straight into the doghouse. Guaranteed ticket to eternal bachelorhood. I was thinking, today being Sunday, having been to Mass, and having seen all those families at church preparing for Confirmation, I got to thinking about the state of the family in general in our post-modern world.

Why is it so fragmented, diffused and disjointed? OK, hold your breath, here comes the extremely unpopular answer, according to Dr. Peter: There are too many women in the paid labour force, competing for too few high-paying full time jobs. OK, I can head to the dog house now, because I’m going to get blasted.

There are simply not enough women staying home, having more than the 1,74 average numbers of children that currently constitutes the birthrate in our province. And it’s not much better in the rest of the country. Estimates from the Québec government put the rate of abortion in our province at between 23-30% of all pregnancies between 1994 and 2008.

Those same women are also not available to drive little Johnny and Jane to and from soccer practice, or if they do, it stresses them out to no end, and they don’t have time or the inclination to prepare a home cooked meal, and sit down with their spouse and children and eat it.

These same women are also not available to do such important traditional tasks such as looking after aging grandparents, singing or directing the local community choir, or church choir, much less have the energy or spiritual inclination to go to a place of worship on Sunday, and worship the God of their understanding, if they are at all able to get their minds around such a concept.

Nor do they have the time or inclination to participate or lead many crucially important community organizations, which need their motherly guidance, organizational abilities, eloquence, and leadership, such as the Brownies, Girl Guides, Pathfinders, community theatre, charities of various kinds, and fellowships like the Order of the Eastern Star, or the cercles de fermières du Québec, which keeps alive the tradition of the culinary arts for women, and other things such as traditional weaving.

This is no small issue, when you consider that 20-25% of all households in North America do not even own a set of pots and pans, much less a person or persons, male or female who knows how to use them competently!!! All of these things used to be passed down from our mothers to their daughters and in some cases to their sons.

We have now so denigrated the institution and vocation of motherhood and domesticity, that most women in today’s society even feel compelled to justify themselves to others, especially to other women, in public especially, if they’ve made the conscious choice of full time stay-at-home motherhood. It is somehow seen as being disloyal to the ‘Cause’, of women’s emancipation, of breaking down barriers, of aggressively knocking down the doors to the last remaining halls of male privilege, and barging in to tell us all where to go, what to do, and where to stick it, like some stereotypically stylized scene from some Julia Roberts-type ‘you go girl’-kind of flick.

Whereupon we’re all supposed to just stand there, awestruck by such a plucky, and tenacious display of estrogen-induced eloquence, and summarily role over, play dead, and surrender all remaining vestiges of evil, patriarchal, testicular fortitude, because, well, she said so.

I think that, instead of giving out an award for Woman CEO of the Year, some organization should give out an award for Mom of the year!!!

OK, I’ve said enough, my room at the doghouse is waiting for me. Don’t worry honey, I know where the key is, I keep it under my food dish. I’m getting used to the routine now. Hey, maybe I’d make a good husband or something?

2 comments on “Never Mind Woman CEO of the Year! How about Mom of the Year!”

Thanks Peter. You have the guts to stand up for us women who are not CEOs but who have done plenty of taxi-ing for soccer games, hockey games–chaperoning dances for the kids and I could add on and on….but you know what I mean..
Yes, I am all for the Mom of the year or the ol’ auntie who played mom as often as she could.
Keep up the good works
Teresa

Glorifying the family life is definitely something we should do more of… but why should it stop at women? Where’s the “dad of the year” prize, and why do we continue to emasculate men who make the brave decision to be a domestic spouse? The overwhelming majority of unsupported single parents are single moms – there’s a lot of work to be done in valuing the domestic role of the father as well.